Paper short abstract:

This paper presents vignettes from three countries - Cuba, Mexico and the Philippines - to consider how and why building or renovating a house is a process through which people materialise urban modernities with remarkable consistencies in aesthetics, form and function.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a series of vignettes to reflect upon how and why building or renovating a house is a process through which people materialise urban modernities that - despite their diverse contexts - appear remarkably consistent in terms of aesthetics, form and function. Across three different examples drawn from longstanding ethnographic work in Cuba, Mexico and the Philippines, I consider a number of recurring features in vernacular housebuilding practices that appear to achieve an aesthetic of emerging lower-middle class modernity. In all three case studies, bunker style 'starter homes', flat roofing, and enclosed air-conditioned spaces are worked towards over periods of years through intermittent renovation, such that renovating the home often becomes the central material marker through which family prosperity, or lack thereof, can be measured. This paper is a starting point for work in progress which suggests house-building and renovation practices in large cities of Southeast Asia and Latin America as one possible location from which vernacular modernities - versions of modernity as they are lived and practiced on the ground - can be investigated and theorised.

Paper short abstract:

From the accumulation of building materials such as cement blocks, concrete, tiles, steel and paint to the analysis of investing in homes over other other life strategies, this paper examines the role of materiality in shaping, structuring and making evident possible futures.

Paper long abstract:

Within the discipline of anthropology the relationship between homes and aspiration have been commonly noted. Yet there remain few studies of the ways in which building aspirations are imagined and realized through the material culture of the home. This paper draws upon ethnographic research in Jamaica to understand the role of materiality in shaping, structuring and making evident possible futures. From the accumulation of building materials such as cement blocks, concrete, tiles, steel and paint to the imagined designs and structures of home, I discuss three core ethnographic examples that highlight the pathways to personhood that are part and parcel of the experience of aspiration. These pathways include property acquisition practices for rural Jamaicans living in and around family land, the provision of housing and home ownership in the national imagination through the development of major urban developments in the 1970s and 1980s; and finally the role of migration as a route to home ownership through a focus upon the increase in return migrants and return migrant communities. I conclude by reflecting upon the ways in which collecting building blocks, concrete, tiles, steel and other materials become part of the personal and national narratives of progress and development.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore the relationship between how people aspire to live in environmentally sustainable ways in their homes, how they imagine possible sustainable activities, and the contingencies of everyday life that frame the ways in which everyday mundane forms of sustainable living actually emerge.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore the relationship between how people aspire to live in environmentally sustainable ways in their homes, how they imagine possible sustainable activities, and the contingencies of everyday life that frame the ways in which everyday mundane forms of sustainable living actually emerge.

In doing so I unpack the messy and contingent ways through which particular forms of environmentally sustainable activities become part of people's imaginary, practical or possible lives. I will argue that environmentally sustainable everyday life in the home is usually necessarily partial. It is constituted and navigated through a range of practical material, sensory and imaginary activities, narratives and desires. However it is always entangled with the contingency of life as it is lived out, wider ambitions and complex socialities.

What then does an equally messy and contingent future mundane everyday life look like - and how does it compare with the visions driven by the technological 'possible' that features so centrally in futures initiatives.

Paper short abstract:

Housing and labour scarcity are central in recent Western Australian mining discourses. A hegemonic globalism situates FIFO labour arrangements as disruptive and disempowering. Contingent neoliberal globalism theory opens on spaces in which workers enact diverse possibilities of housing and home.

Paper long abstract:

Housing, viewed through the lens of accommodation shortages, equity issues, wealth accumulation, development potential and associated labour and infrastructure requirements in Western Australia related to the recent globally driven mining boom has been a central concern for policy makers and industry, employees and impacted communities, and various social commentators. Solutions to the twin mine related issues of housing and labour scarcity have frequently been contentious.. The geography of Western Australia results in major mining projects located in sparsely populated remote regions distant from urbanised population centres. While the construction of company towns provided a solution from the 1960s, increased aviation capacity, government retreat from remote interventions and a corporate turn toward greater labour flexibility, saw a rise in Fly-in Fly-out (FIFO) workforce arrangements from the 1980s. The arrangements, where workers leave home and family to live in on-site camp accommodation for regular intensive compressed shift rosters, has been interpreted through a hegemonic neoliberalism lens, as disruptive and disempowering of labour solidarity, community, and the norms of family life. Housing emerges as a crucial normative element of modern domestic life. FIFO participants are simultaneously represented as victims and agents of disruptive capitalist development. Aligning with scholars who reject 'strong or idealised theories' of neoliberal globalisation for a theory of contingency and hybridity, allows this the authors of this paper to seek out and explore the spaces around dominant policies and practices in which FIFO workers and families navigate the challenges of intermittent separation and intimacy, and enact particular notions of housing, home and domestic life.

Paper short abstract:

The Auckland housing market is superheated, and the house auctions are the market place of a specific neoliberal version of morality articulated through value, values, and valuables.

Paper long abstract:

The Auckland housing market is superheated. The distillation of value as price that takes place in the intensity and drama of housing auctions, and the discursive affective space that this marketing is part of in terms of the creation of value that is happening in the Auckland housing market, speaks to an explicitly neoliberal version of morality as per 'late capitalism' that is evolving in New Zealand.

The New Zealand housing market is considered to be one of the most expensive in the world. House sales in Auckland constitute more than three quarters of this market and the monetary value of houses in the region is escalating at almost three times the rate of the rest of the country. The commentary about the Auckland housing market, depending on to whom or which organisation you listen to, tells a story of the triumphant prosperity of the New Zealand economy at one extreme, or is a case in point of rampant and growing inequalities in New Zealand at the other.

Standard economic analysis looks at the increase in value as a question of capital in supply-and-demand and either negates or ignores what Guyer calls "the socio-political dynamics that frame both the spectrum of monetary values and the transactional practices [in superheated housing markets - like Auckland]" (2015: 498). Such transactional practices and the spectra of that neoliberal morality are exemplified in the context of house auctions which are the focus of this paper and a particular version of 'morality and marketplace'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how middle class residents in a mega housing complex in Jakarta understand and experiment with new forms of vertical living as they work towards their futures.

Paper long abstract:

Vertical living has become increasingly part of middle class life in Jakarta, mostly in the form of upscale condominiums and, more recently, high-rise units in vast residential housing complexes. While the trend towards vertical living mirrors similar developments in other cities in East and Southeast Asia, relatively little is known about social life inside Jakarta's mega housing complexes.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic research conducted in 2015, this paper discusses middle class residents' understandings and experiences of vertical living in Kalibata City, a high-rise mega complex consisting of 19 towers and approximately 14,000 residents. On the one hand, vertical living offers Kalibata residents privacy and anonymity, ample speculation and investment opportunities, and a claim to modern city life with all its moral ambiguities. At the same time, many residents anticipate that they will temporarily live in Kalibata, as they own other property elsewhere or hope to use Kalibata as a platform to launch their professional careers and branch out into the wider city. This paper considers residents' views and experiences with vertical living, as well as their various attachments, detachment and circulations within Kalibata and its surroundings as they try to establish themselves in the wider city.

Paper short abstract:

Home-ownership in Singapore is a cumbersome bureaucratic process. The long waiting time often sees young couples negotiating aspirations, expectancies, and delayed gratification. This paper articulates recent first-time homeowners' journeys, their tensions, and early homemaking practices.

Paper long abstract:

Owning a house is an exciting milestone for young couples. In Singapore, heavily-subsidised public housing is a viable albeit tightly regulated option for first-time homeowners administered by the Housing Development Board (HDB). Young couples often embark on bureaucratic navigations that can take up to four years. As a result, marriage, childbirth, and homemaking is closely tied to the transience of their interstitial housing arrangements. Naturally, 'the big move' that eventuates has become a ritualised spectacle in which young couples can finally enact their homemaking aspirations. Based on personal interviews with recent first-time homeowners in their mid-20s, this paper outlines young couples' trajectories of home ownership in Singapore, their narratives of prolonged expectancies and delayed gratification, and their first makings of a shared domestic space.

Paper short abstract:

This paper calls upon fieldwork gathered during the unfolding of Australia’s largest remote area Indigenous housing and infrastructure program to explore the moral pedagogy embedded within housing policy formulation and implementation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper calls upon fieldwork gathered during the unfolding of Australia's largest remote area Indigenous housing and infrastructure program, the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP), to explore the hidden moralities of housing. It argues that houses are expected to exert a moral force on Indigenous people, transforming their lifeworlds towards the habits of institutionalised existence (routinised school attendance, employment and most importantly, financialised indebtedness), but there is more to it than this. While such moralities are certainly the justification for (providing or withholding) interventions, the moral pedagogy of housing can also be located in the anarchic conditions of policy assemblage and implementation. Switching attention to these infrastructural moralities, I probe the affective conditions under which a construction program, meant to deliver well-designed and robustly-built housing to create a fixed and orderly population, has to be wilfully and doggedly pulled into place. Attention is also turned to the moral framings within housing analyses: what moral forms are in play when housing policy can only be analysed in terms of the householder and not its construction agents?

Paper short abstract:

Examining the materiality of beds, swags and bunks and how they are respectively used by younger or older Warlpiri people, to explore the materiality of inside/outside sleeping, and to reflect on age-graded phenomenological experiences of houses at Yuendumu

Paper long abstract:

The crux of my paper lies in ethnographically exploring the materiality of age-graded sleeping practices of Warlpiri people at Yuendumu, central Australian Aboriginal town. I focus on a currently observable trend among younger Warlpiri couples to invest in large, solid beds on which they sleep inside bedrooms in the houses of Yuendumu. This sets them apart from older Warlpiri people, who tend to sleep on bunks or mattresses, more easily moveable and which allow them to sleep in different locations in and around the house depending on weather, social composition of the household, and personal preference. While this age-graded distinction in sleeping materiality highlights a general trend of the younger generations towards utilising the inside of houses in novel ways for desert towns, it gets complicated through the issues surrounding swags. The latter are used by Warlpiri people of all ages, especially for sleeping in ritual camps and out bush, but, importantly, new children-sized swags enable a new kind of mobility for children between the outside and the inside of houses and moving between parental and more senior kin. I analyse these sleeping materialities as emergent forms of modernity, and push this analysis further by examining the ways in which beds, bunks, adult swags and children's swags, respectively, are or are not swapped, borrowed and given away. In my conclusion, I ponder the interconnectivities between the age-differentiated phenomenological experiences of living inside or outside the house and novel ways of owning material household items.